Golf’s masters fuel my forest ire

FOR some time now, it has seemed to me that tournament golf professionals are governed by a set of rules quite different from those which are applied to the rest of us. Trees, for example. Stick a professional in the woods and, more often than not, after a bit of wandering about consulting cards, charts and checking the position of the planets, he will end up playing from an apparently perfect lie and belting his ball to a distant green – usually the one he’s making for. Even when things go wron

During the run-up to the US Masters, the TV people showed a flashback to last year’s event and the big finish which featured Chad Campbell, Kenny Perry and the eventual winner, Angel Cabrera. I’d forgotten how hairy things got for Cabrera on the first hole of the play-off. His drive, having swung into a forest, looked to be dead and buried. This impression seemed to have been confirmed when his attempted recovery whined away off a tree trunk. I’ve done this often and it’s normally a pretty fair indication that the hole isn’t going to get finished. In Cabrera’s case, the ball found its way to a perfect fairway lie from where he secured his par and forged on to wrap up the tournament at the second play-off hole.

Of course, we’ve all had the odd break now and again, but the breaks don’t seem to be dished out in such large dollops as they are to the professionals. This might have something to do with the fact that they can actually play the game and know what they’re doing, but it can’t all be down to that. The old saying about trees being 90 per cent air – or whatever daft percentage it is – has never convinced me. I’ve been hitting trees for years and have rarely found any air in any of them. They all seem as solid as walls. Even thin, weedy trees appear to be short on air and if I could hit approach shots with the same deadly accuracy with which I can smash a ball squarely into the trunk of a pencil-slim tree, I could emerge as a considerable force in this game.

One of the things which amazes me about professionals is their ability to tailor their swings to operate effectively in cramped situations. If they find themselves so close to a tree that they can’t make their normal swing without making contact with, say, a low-slung branch, they can rehearse a cut-down version of the swing until they’ve achieved an action with which they can deliver a decent blow and then go ahead and do it.

This is something I find more or less impossible.

For me, it is a no-win situation. No matter how diligently I rehearse a curtailed swing with a view to avoiding an obstacle, it never behaves on the actual shot as it did during rehearsals. The swing either goes on a couple of feet or so more than I intended it to and causes the club to hit the obstacle, or else I exaggerate the limits I’ve tried to impose on the swing and chop it off so short is isn’t really any kind of swing at all.

The outcome in either case tends to be that the ball is topped, shanked or missed altogether. There have been times when I have known I was far enough away from a tree to swing freely and without inhibition, but just being conscious of its proximity has been sufficient to cause a sort of paralysis of limb and brain.

Now that the painful subject of air shots has been introduced, I am reminded of a harrowing woodland episode concerning a colleague with whom I played in a Press Club medal some years ago. The man in question was a powerful golfer and an amiable sort as a rule, though inclined to be afflicted by bouts of rage in moments of stress on the links. He was moving along steadily until he put a bit of heave-ho into a drive and hooked his ball into the roots of a large tree.

The roots were splayed out, breaking the surface here and there and seemed to go on for miles. It was difficult to stand on them never mind play a golf shot and it took our man some time to get himself settled in a way which would enable him to swing without falling flat on his face. A root lay behind and close to the ball and another one lay just ahead. He was, in addition, leaning against the trunk. To me it looked like a job for a JCB.

He planned to drop the head of his wedge down and over the first root and get the ball up quickly to clear the next one. What happened was that the club struck the first root, bounced over the ball and struck the second root, at which point the head came off, leaving the golfer clutching the remains with one hand and the tree trunk with the other. I remember thinking that if he got any redder he’d burst into flames.